If you’ve ever read through a few classic books, you may have
noticed some discrepancies.
Some are engaging, deep, or easy to read, while others seem so bad you
wonder how people ever enjoyed them.
But why is that?
What exactly about these books that makes them enjoyable or unbearable?
What allows some books to hold up through the year while others fall out
of favor?
To investigate the popularity of classic
books in the modern day, we will be looking at 19 novels and
stories published around the 19th century and comparing their features and current
popularity based on modern Goodreads ratings.
We will start by examining the structure of these books.
Rating by Length of book
Paragraph Length
Word length
Dialog
While we were able to identify some trends for book rating from the
structural data, it certainly leaves a lot unexplained.
How about the book “demographics”? Could this tell us more?
Author Gender
Not much to be seen here
Year of Publication
No clear trends here either
So book demographics didn’t clear much up
Could the emotional content of book explain more about their
popularity?
Positive vs Negative Emotion scale
The ratings show no clear preference for positive or negative language
alone.
But what if we look at individual emotions?
Emotional scores
Some emotions have a clear correlation with Rating, like joy, anticipation, and trust
But others are more complicated, like anger, disgust, and sadness
Looking at the points as a whole, the relationship doesn’t look strong.
However, if we exclude 5 specific books the rest follow a strong trend.
In fact, those books are similarly located for all of the emotional
scores.
Could the overall quantity of emotion be an important predictor?
It seems that this phenomena is limitted to just these few books rather
than being a general trend
Case Study
So then, why are books like Brothers Karamazov and Anne of Green Gables
so much high rated than other similar books?
Lets compare the emotional composition of Anne of Green Gables and The
Awakening. Both are dramas with a young women protagonist, written by
female authors around the end of the 19th century. However, Anne of
Green Gables was an immediate hit and remains highly rated today, while
the Awakening was criticized when first published, only gained some
popularity later in the 20th century and remains lower rated today.
Anne of Green Gables
The Awakening
Rating
4.31
3.68
Publication Year
1908
1899
Author Gender
Female
Female
Word count
93740
45270
Chapter count
39
40
Average Word Length
4.96
5.21
Average Words per Paragraph
56.54
44.89
Dialog to Paragraph Ratio
0.4914
0.3476
The clearest difference between the two is the higher emotional content
in Anne of Green Gables.
This is especially true in relation to emotions like trust, joy, and
anticipation, which were correlated with higher book popularity.
Conclusion
We can see some trends with Anne of Green Gables and the Awakening that
help explain their popularity now, but it doesn’t tell us the whole
story.
Why was the Awakening so criticized at its publication while Anne of
Green Gables was loved? Just because it had less emotion and slightly
longer words?
To full explain trends in popularity, we need something else: Context.
The awakening was criticized when it came out around the turn of the
20th century because it depicted a woman going against gender roles and
was too dark and ‘immoral’ for people at that time, but was later picked
up in the second half of the 20th century as society shifted in that
direction, before losing popularity again as the social movement became
old news and people started finding it boring.
Anne of Green Gables, on the other hand, was a wholesome story that
didn’t meet the same complications.
In the end, we can look at what makes up a popular book, but as seen
with The Awakening and Anne of Green Gables, with just that it is
difficult to capture all the context and intricacies that truly make a
book popular.